A study to determine the community perception of the neighbourhood health committee functions in Kasama urban district.

Abstract

The study aimed to determine the community perception towards the Neighborhood Health Committee (NHC) functions in Kasama Urban District. The NHCs are indirectly responsible for the rise in disease burden as they are expected to teach on disease prevention to the community. A non-interventional descriptive design was used to obtain an accurate account of the phenomenon under study. Simple random sampling method was used to pick two health centres from the four health centres found in Kasama Urban District namely Kasama Urban Clinic and TAZARA Health Centre. Multistage cluster sampling technique was used to select four different communities namely Musenga, Kapoka, Chishipula and Nakapampa Chale falling under the Kasama Urban clinic and the xn

Tanzania Zambia Railways clinic respectively. Each of the communities was divided into sections and three (3) sections were selected from each of the communities using the rotary method. Respondents were selected from sixty (60) households using systematic random sampling technique from the selected sections. The respondents comprised of heads of households found in the respective communities. A structured interview questionnaire was used to collect data from the respondents. The study findings revealed that the knowledge levels of the community had increased in comparison to the previous studies done on NHCs. The study results also showed that (62%) of the respondents exhibited adequate knowledge on the NHC functions. On the contrary it was also revealed that more than half (53%) of the respondents had a negative attitude towards the NHCs. It was further found out that among those that had a negative attitude, most of them attained lower primary education and had no source of income. The findings also revealed a number of factors that could have attributed to the NHC ineffectiveness that could have lead to the community's negative attitude towards the NHCs.